The Universe of Discourse

Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" sounds very much like one of my favorites, "Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover". It's interesting to compare.

Thinking on that it suddenly occured to me that his name might have been a play on “diddley bow”, which is a sort of homemade one-stringed zither. The player uses a bottle as a bridge for the string, and changes the pitch by sliding the bottle up and down. When you hear about blues artists whose first guitars were homemade, this is often what was meant: it wasn't a six-string guitar, it was a diddley bow.

But it's not clear that Bo Diddley did play his name on the diddley bow. "Diddly" also means something insignificant or of little value, and might have been a disparaging nickname he received in his youth. (It also appears in the phrase "diddly squat"). Maybe that's also the source of the name of the diddley bow.

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